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Guidelines for API Usage

Modified on: Wed, 9 May, 2018 at 10:46 AM

The SystemWeaver API is a powerful tool for interacting with the SystemWeaver server, far surpassing the possibilities of reading and producing data done by a normal user through the SystemWeaver Explorer. To ensure a quality experience for users of the SystemWeaver application as well as to optimize application performance, we strongly recommend the following guidelines for usage of the SystemWeaver API:

Performance guidelines:

Always use a test server for API application development. Using the production server for testing may impact the performance for connected users and, in the worst case scenario, change or destroy production data.

Neverallow more than one program to create and/or modify data in the same structure at the same time.

Creating/modifying large amounts of data should be done outside of working hours or the amount of write operations per second needs to be restricted so as not to affect the performance for other connected users. Every write operation is communicated to all connected users to keep them in sync, potentially making their applications slow or unresponsive if the server produces large amounts of update messages.

If the connection to the server has a high latency, the performance of the API application when creating/modifying large amounts of data will be impacted. Make sure that the latency is as low as possible to minimize the execution time for the program.

Stay logged in to the SystemWeaver server if your program reads data from the same structure repetitively. The local cache will improve the performance of your application and reduce the performance impact for the SystemWeaver server. Logging out will clear this cache.

Coding guidelines:

Do not create or generate classes in your program based on SystemWeaver item, part or attribute types. Types are changed, added and removed over time. This is a natural part of the evolution of a SystemWeaver installation as the organization changes over time. Creating classes for this will make your program hard to maintain.

Do not edit Descriptions that have been created in SystemWeaver using your API program. If they contain Description references, these Description references will be destroyed since the functionality is an extension of the Rich View format. If the descriptions are always edited through your program, this does not apply.